Remember the Shakers? "Gift to Be Simple?" Simple furniture? And of course they're basically extinct now. And one of the reasons is that, among the creed of Shakerdom is that one should be celibate. Not just the priests -- everybody.

Well, it's not so surprising that they've gone extinct. But in fact that's not why they went extinct. They survived as long as they did at a time when the social safety nets weren't there and there were lots of widows and orphans, people like that, who needed a foster home. And so they had a ready supply of converts. And they could keep it going. And, in principle, it could've gone on forever. With perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts. The idea being passed on through proselytizing, instead of through the gene line.

So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they're not being passed on genetically. A meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shakerdom was essentially a sterilizing parasite.

There are other parasites which do this -- which render the host sterile. It's part of their plan. They don't have to have minds to have a plan.

Membership in the Shakers dwindled in the late 1800s for several reasons. People were attracted to cities and away from the farms. Shaker products could not compete with mass-produced products that became available at a much lower cost. Shakers could not have children, so adoption was a major source of new members. This continued until the states gained control of adoption homes.

I suspect the best parallel that one could draw from the Shakers is the need to be agile in response to changing demographic, economic, and cultural trends.

Unlike the Shakers, we do plenty of fucking but our reproductive fucking may not lead to growth. If our churches are good at attracting adult seekers but repel adult who were our former children, that could be one very big reason that we have growth concerns.

Finally, our current growth strategy has one similarity to the Shaker's "orphan" strategy. There is no guarantee that we will always have a ready supply of adult seekers looking for a religious community. Christianity as a demographic group is shrinking the US and most of our adult coverts come from a Christian background. The "atheist - agnostic - unchurched" demographic has doubled over the past decade so they are around 15% of the population. And this appears to be a demographic group that has very little interest for what Unitarian Universalism offers (in part because we're perceived as being "too religious" by some non-theists).

Our traditional recruiting pool for adult converts is shrinking.

We reproduce but drive off many of our offspring who were raised in our churches.

And we may be currently ineffective at attracting growing demographic groups.

Like the Shakers, we may be facing demographic, economic, and cultural changes.

1 comment:

Steve, I agree with most of your point, but I think you were not specific enough on one area: We generally recruit from WHITE adults.

Our very blogosphere is rife with UUs who are opposed to the idea of ethnic diversity recruitment.

Our need to expand is even greater than that, I would say. Our churches need to knit together a community of their neighbor UU Churches within regions. Our ministers need to be a part of a vision where the church presents itself as an alternative center of social life for young families with kids.

That does not mean a good RE program, it means social events organized and maintained by paid staff that reinforce the concept of a church and by extention faith community.

Single young adult UU's of one church would be silly to date within their church. So are there events in these churches where single UU's can meet and date outside their congregation? Multi-church picnics? Jamborees?

Not Circle dinners, or couch groups, those are empty nest affections.

And it must be run by staff. In a world of economic turmoil most families work 2 jobs and do not have the time to run these things. Church staff must, and they should because in the end they benefit the most from it.

These events can bring in more congregants, as people invite friends to them.

Think about it, a UU picnic would be the most non-religious church picnic outthere. Sure there's a greater chance it would be pick-up soccer than flag football, and yeah rugby over a softball game, and the food would more likely be gourmet and healthy than fried, but in the end it would be a great recruiting tool.

More congregants means potentially more money, a bigger budget and more secure staff jobs. Too often Ministers and staff do not see this, they want the congregation to do it.